I love food and I love everything involved with food. I love the fun of it. I love restaurants. I love cooking, although I don't cook very much. I love kitchens.

The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.

What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next?

You know, one, two, three, four, five years go by and then Marcos gets a little boring.

One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.

I think the great Mexican cuisine is dying because there are fast foods now competing, because there are supermarkets, and supermarkets can't afford to keep in stock a lot of these very perishable products that are used for fine Mexican cooking. Women are working and real Mexican cooking requires enormous amounts of time.

If you're going to be a myth or want to be a myth, you'd better die young.